A/N:
MARBÎTH- Ghosts that are new/young
As a quick note, I conceived the circumstances around Fili and Kili's demises long before BOFTA gave us its version of events and had a slightly more canon-conscious rough draft of this chapter written awhile ago that I'm going to stick with, so not to create any confusion with my "version" of the events at Ravenhill.
The bargeman was an impatient man who employed several equally acerbic-looking sons as oarsmen. The beckoned the dwarves aboard curtly and squashed their wagons and pack animals together in the space haphazardly, without much care for anyone's comfort. Thorin kept a keen watch over Meisar, in spite of the strength that has visibly recovered itself in her, bundled as she was beneath cloak and a wool shawl about her head. Dwarves were strong, he assured himself quietly inside. She was strong.
My love I need your strength.
The watery path out of the quay and into the open water of the Long Lake was an exercise in steering skill. Boats cluttered all around the market pool and the channels of the town, a full market open and bustling. Nets bursting with fish were hauled up, boatloads of barrels filled with lagers, wines and mead unloaded, and more boats still passed along the channel into the town itself, filled with bolts of fine fabric, weapons, wares and riches. Thorin watched several dwarves in the colored aprons of their guilds, green and red and blue for the cutters of emerald, ruby and sapphire respectively, gently pass decorative cases to men upon the quay. "It lives again," remarked Balin quietly.
Thorin didn't answer.
Freyda trailed up and down along the side of the barge as it made its way toward the gates. She smoothed the top of her head where the wind lifted a stray strand of pale hair from its rigid, studded plait. On top she donned the same silvery hauberk of mail, the bottom half of her though clad in a straight skirt of sea-blue velvet, a single woven panel down the center. How it embraced the strong curvature of her figure did not go unnoticed. Dwalin watched her stride down the length of the barge, out of Thorin's view. He didn't seem to be paying much attention either way; the king held fast to his betrothed from the time the watery portcullis out of the north of Lake Town was raised, and they set on their way. The sunrise held a low, cold late autumn light to the east. Against the rising sun Dwalin swigged the last of what was in the jug of coffee, making a miserable face against the dawn to find it already emptied. He gave Freyda a woeful shrug and managed, in her direction, a subtle grin.
"The mountain," Freyda noted quietly toward Dwalin, with a practiced ease. "Isn't it beautiful in the morning light?"
"Aye it is," he replied, utterly flat of affect. Thorin offered her a helpless nod of comfort. Dwalin treaded heavily down the other side of the boat, deposited the empty jug in a basket hanging out the back of Freyda's wagon. He returned back to the bow of the boat and walked past her to stand stodgily at Thorin's side staring into the water. Freyda flexed her arms, sore from grinding coffee beans, in front of her, her lip pressed out, miffed.
They traveled along the river until the boat docked abruptly on its east bank, at the part where it swerved in a sharp brief westward bend, several miles or so from the northern mouth of the Long Lake. The bargeman climbed off and withdrew the gangplank, setting it roughly on the dock. A terse hand waved the dwarves to him on the dock, the pack animals all rushing forward.
"You're leaving us here?" squawked Emli. "We are destined for the mountain, sir. The mountain!" Emli pointed in bemusement toward the gates of the Lonely Mountain.
"It's what you paid for," the bargeman replied gruffly. "You paid me to bring you to the mountain. Is that not the mountain?" He jammed his finger as irately just to the north of the river bend, toward a sharp apex rising out of the edge of one of the Lonely Mountain's great spurs.
"Bâha-zunsh-hund," muttered Dwalin darkly under his breath. The bargeman's eye flicked toward him, suspiciously. "What did you say, dwarf?"
Dwalin's head snapped up toward him ominously. "Nothing that's yer business, Tub-Thumper." Affronted, one of the oarsmen hauled the great wooden paddle from the water and whooshed it roughly toward Dwalin. The dwarf caught it in one rough inked hand and flashed a warning toward them that it would be broken with his bare hands if they so much as moved an inch.
"Let us disembark here," Thorin commanded forthwith and stentorian. Beside him, he took Meisar's hand tightly in his own and held fast. The abrasive texture of his fingers linking tight into hers had always been of sublime pleasure to her own flesh, but at the moment it fell urgent and full of pain. The dwarves who had begun to squabble with the oarsmen stopped their nattering and yielded back with quiet deference, when Thorin's voice raised again, ordering them to shore. Thorin moved quickly and summoned Dwalin, who dropped the oar with force and snarled toward the oarsman as he disembarked behind Thorin, Balin nudging his back urgently off the boat.
"Thorin?" Balin asked wearily for some explanation.
"I said," growled Thorin ominously. "We stop here. It is not a long trek to the mountain with the ponies."
Balin hurried off beside Thorin, peering across to Meisar for answers, but she had none, and shrugged helplessly at him. Thorin's grip on her hand tightened. "Good," he murmured in a disconsolate tone. "Good, good. I needed..." His voice trailed off self-consciously when he saw her looking at him, puzzled.
They soldiered north, the pack animals treading obstreperously along the fresh rutted road a year's worth of traveling dwarves and men had hastily made through the old desolation. "Where we goin'?" Freyda asked in a whisper, to no one in particular. She noted a darkening quality about Dwalin's expression, and did not ask again when no answer came from either him or Thorin. They treaded over the hard, cold ground toward a looming hill. When they came close enough to its base from the road, Thorin turned quietly to Emli and Gimli. "Go forward to the mountain. We take our leave here." He nodded the same instructions toward Oin, Gyda, Freyda and Balin. "I must go to Ravenhill," he announced forlornly but solidly to the bemused cadre.
"Thorin!" Dwalin yelped uncannily high. "We've got to get back to Erebor. It'll be dark soon!" His head jerked furiously toward Balin, silently begging him to reason against it. Balin ignored him, to his consternation. "I prefer to stay by your side laddie, whatever it is you seek in this place," Balin patted Thorin's arm determined to comfort, but there was a tightness in his voice that Freyda took immediate note of, if Thorin did not. She drew a step close to Dwalin, even tighter in his stance. He looked like a bowstring about to snap.
"I'll stay," Freyda mouthed to Balin, silently. The old dwarf nodded to her, stationed behind his brother, gratefully.
"Ravenhill it is then," Dwalin muttered. A waver coming on in his voice, he stopped speaking and folded his arms tight across his chest. Emli swooshed around back toward Meisar, taking her warm if doleful embrace. She smelled of an exotic, spicy perfume and pomade. "Find me when you come," she urged Meisar with a small, insistent smile. She drew back and held her arms above the elbow lightly. "We'll have a great deal of planning to do and not much time. And yourself," Emli turned to Thorin and then up toward Ravenhill, blinking back a tear from the corner of her eye.
Gimli helped his uncle Oin onto his pony and joined his mother in the seat of the wagon, all three of them looking back until the road dipped low around a bend. "There is a staircase on the west side for the sentries to climb. Come now," said Thorin when they were out of sight. "Come."
Dwalin balked and the whole of his form seemed to draw back as if hit outright, as they approached. Thorin turned when he realized that Dwalin wasn't following as close behind.
"Dwalin?"
"I'm sorry. I can't…"
"Brother?" Balin's brows knit together beguiled.
"I said I can't," thundered Dwalin suddenly. Without another word and virtually holding back rancorous tears, he clenched his jaw and spun away from the sight of both Thorin and Balin.
Balin lowered his head, yielding suddenly. He had seen not one die but both. Maybe that made it worse. Making a delicate approach, Thorin sighed forgivingly against Dwalin's back. "Dwalin, it is of no consequence. I know your heart. But I must make my peace at this place, before I look my sister in the eye." He placed his hand on Dwalin's shoulder from behind but he flinched, with a twinge of hostility. Thorin withdrew from him, silently wounded.
"I will accompany you," Meisar offered quietly.
"Balin, perhaps you should go ahead. It is five odd hours to reach the front gate still," suggested Thorin, rubbing the back of his neck. Balin looked between Thorin and Dwalin at a distance and quietly agreed. He put his hand to the small of his back and pressed lightly; it was sore, like his legs. His pony nodded at him as if in acknowledgement.
"Are you well enough to climb, Meisar?"
"Yes." She hugged the cloak and shawl tenuously about her shoulders. Thorin turned to Balin again. "Tarry on. We will follow soon."
"Thorin?" He felt Balin's hand rest on his shoulder, the old dwarf seeming to lean on him.
"I do not intend long to stay. But I have to." Balin peeled his hand back from his shoulder and patted it. "I know, laddie. I know."
Once Thorin had disappeared around the bend of the stone stairs Dwalin turned rapidly on his heel and stormed off ahead past Freyda and Balin, Harley whinnying after him but even the pony daring not to follow. "Should we let him be awhile?" Freyda inquired darkly of Balin, but he didn't answer. "I dinna know they was going up to Ravenhill. Isn't that where…?"
"Yes," Balin answered in a sharp exhalation.
Freyda paused woefully. Balin leaned heavily on his walking stick and Freyda offered him her arm, which he leaned on, weightily. "Dwalin was present… at the final moments of each of the princes' lives. Slain by Azog the Defiler Kili was, and Fili by an arrow of his ilk," he explained, a quiet solidness to him but pain, all too fresh still to hide. Freyda drew her lip inward, her throat feeling swollen. Balin went on. "When he came to Thorin, he was too late. Bilbo Baggins had comforted him in the last. The poor Hobbit was so wrought by grief and tears he curled up in a wee ball upon the naked ice, and none could prise him to stand again for many hours. After the funerals, Dwalin didn't eat or drink for days..."
"But, the king? He was-?"
"The wizard of course did the rest, and should he come about again, I should interrogate him as to his methods. They had even an old dwarf fooled. Then I shall shake him about the shoulders vigorously." Tears built in the old dwarf's eyes and Freyda reached over and set her opposite hand upon Balin's arm that was bracing tightly on her opposite one. "I worry for him, my brother. Even now." He pressed on Freyda's arm for leverage as he stood. Starting off in Dwalin's direction with a refractory glance and intent, Freyda stopped him. "I'll go. He ain't too happy with ye right now. And he won't smack me upside me head. Least not this time."
"Fine lass," smiled Balin, wearily. "Fine lass ye are. Don't be offended if won't talk to ye though. Never was one of many words."
Freyda nodded and when she approached quietly from behind he only glanced sharply and briefly over his shoulder at her before turning his head back to his hands. He looked disconcertingly vulnerable to her, and had it frightened her, she might have drawn back, but something about him seemed to cry out for the presence of another, an inexplicable force in the air between them. "Ye alright, Mister Dwalin?"
"Aye." He kept his back to her, the tips of fingers digging into his sides, arms wrapped about his torso tight. Freyda took a small step back.
"I'll leave ye to yer own if ye please. I just wanted to-"
"Stay." An arm unfolded and his hand placed itself heavily on the rock beside him, patting it twice over. Freyda sat quietly beside him.
"I saw them die," he told her quickly and succinctly, the expression on his face stone. "They rushed far ahead of me, to Thorin. One was taken by a blade, the other by an arrow to the throat. I tried to staunch the bleeding on Kili. But the orcs were too many. I had to fight them off. By the time I left him and reached Thorin, he was gone too."
Freyda stymied an instinctual urge to reassure him that his king was not gone, but thought better of it. Dwalin uttered nothing, not even his characteristic grumbles and grunts, for a long moment. Abruptly, as she was about to draw away, he skittered his hand across the stone and placed it on hers. The tattooed fingers wrapped into her own and clenched, so tightly she felt as if she were steeling him again as his dislocated arm was set. Eyes opened wide toward him yet he did not face her. His eyes kept downward to the ground, the once bellicose quality of them shaded by something far more traumatized in nature than even a soldier's heart could bear taciturnly.
"I'm sorry for the things ye had to see, Mister Dwalin."
He fumbled in his pouch for a moment and withdrew a small round wrinkled object. The hand that had gripped at Freyda's released slightly, only to pry her fingers open and press the object into her palm. "Here," he said. "I want ye to have it."
.
His hand folded firmly into Meisar's, fingers curling back to grip hers when Meisar fell slightly behind, Thorin crossed the flat surface of the hill quietly after navigating many sets of stairs. Hand in hand they ascended in stony, reverent silence, until they reached, after a brief plateau, ice-crusted gulf, accessible to cross only by a narrow plank bridge that had been hastily lain across the divide. On the other side the old guard tower rose, crumbling but within, a light. The shadows of two dwarven sentries moved quietly in the openings in the stone.
"I have dreamed of this place for days and nights," Thorin breathed after a long silence. "To see it is to banish the ghosts. I know they are real. They were real. They were here." He stopped and knelt, on one knee, the opposite buckling as he lowered himself. He touched the ground and flinched. "So you know?"
"I know what this place is."
He withdrew a black rune-stone from his coat and placed it tenderly upon the ground. "You died here?" she asked, flatly.
"Fili." He covered the stone tenderly in gray snow, piled a handful of rocks upon it. "This was his."
His mouth was set straight but he resisted looking over into her eyes. They held, wavering, at the ground. His hand pressed there tight, as if he could still feel the life that had once existed here, in the twilight moments of his life. "At the end of this bridge where it was stone, he fell. I could not bear the sight. I slipped into unconsciousness. Merciful. A mercy denied my dear sister. She had two of these runes made for them. Fili's to grant him fortitude and strength to lead. Kili's to protect him from recklessness. Is not the younger always that?" His breath drew in sharply.
"Thorin..."
"A great smith they say, but can The Creator ever reforge what was broken, wholly? I have cried to Mahal in my grief so many times, but I don't think he can hear me. I came up here hoping they would." He withdrew the harp from its cold velvet casing and sat upon the ground, with no care for the gathering ice or lepidote ground under him. Meisar still stood and hugged the cloak and shawl tighter about her, the wind feeling that much colder up on the hill; she feared the fever might return but cared nothing for it.
"He didn't sleep well as an infant. He cried all night," he murmured so low under his breath she could not hear, but dared not ask him repeat himself. He ran a finger over the tautest string and thrummed at it mindlessly. The sound of it, however subdued, seemed to reverberate off the walls of the guard tower across the way. "Dis could never calm him. Only this one song."
He began to strum something unfamiliar to her, to sing, in a wavering deep lilt struggling over each word. The song was drawn-out, a lullaby but a lugubrious one. "Father quelled Dis with this very song when she was a babe, and 'amad in the tomb," Thorin explained through tight lips when he paused. Finger strummed and plucked on. "A mourning song," he breathed. "Perhaps it was a prophecy all along."
"To think you quelling a babe. Since I have heard you sing, I believe it," she smiled forcibly, anguish threatening to take her knees from beneath her as she knelt down finally beside him and placing her arms over his shoulders and rubbed them, wordlessly assuaging.
"Their stubbornness far outweighed my own. I would have wished them stay with their mother. I begged them to, well-knowing I needed two young, strong warriors for this quest. But they refused to remain. I suppose I can only admire their loyalty in that matter." The stony dignity which had held on so desperately broke without warning and claimed his body like the blow of an ax. She held him as thick, drawn-out sobs wracked every inch of his form. One after another heaved and rolled in heavy tides of grief that took his breath away and left him gasping in pain.
"Thorin…" she whispered his name in meek, helpless want of comforting him, several times over until she finally thought it better to say nothing at all, just hold him. He rubbed his face hard against the icy, abrasive ground and she lifted his head from doing so with a delicateness to her touch but a force nonetheless, until he lay silently across her knee gasping for breath. Fingers dug deep into her just above the knee and may have gouged her enough to leave welts through the dense, thick wool of her clothing even. She lifted the grasping hand from her knee and kissed the knuckles, sprinkling them with tears of her own. The fist did not unclench no matter how gently and lengthily she tried to urge his blunt nails out of his palms.
"From the Halls of our Fathers, hear me. My sister sons..." The thick strangled sobs that rattled into her knee and into her very bones went on and on. She twisted her body to lay parallel with him, wrapped her arm around him, forearm to his chest; it seemed to cave in with his sobs. She sat up again and rested his head in the crook of her arm and let him pour his wretched cries into the wool of her cloak and dress. Eventually they ebbed into a silent, shaking grief, in the course of which, she held on silently to him.
He had never cried in her presence. She had no words, for moments and moments and moments that dragged on with eternal slowness. "They see you," she said finally and breathily when the urge in her to break that agonizing silence became too strong to bear. "They see us."
Out of the corner of her eye, from a distance approached two dwarves in full, if exotic armor, tottering slowly across the wooden bridge toward them. Their black beards were combed straight and pointed and narrow eyes focused at them with military precision. They did not carry axes but spears only, long slim spears painted blood red with jet-black tips as if from onyx carved. She had never seen any dwarven weapon quite like them. The spears were not drawn at them but as they drew closer they made her a bit uneasy. Thorin, still laid heavy across her knee, splayed out there upon the ground, took no note. The two dwarves closed in, curiously. When they first looked upon her face they drew back, muttered to each other in a dialect she could not readily identify. But it was Khuzdul all the same and she knew their words. Dwarf, they said. Beardless dwarf. They looked back at her and narrowed their eyes further, one waving a spear at her. She flapped a hand at them irritably, subtly at first and then more aggressively when they did not disperse.
"Leave us," she ordered quietly. "We are dwarves."
The two sentries still stood, un-moving. "In the name of your king, Thorin son of Thrain son of Thror, let us be," she commanded then. "Your queen commands it."
The sentries surveyed the disheveled dwarrowdam in her over-sized, shapeless dress and frayed shawl and blinked, their spears butting forward in their hands. She pushed back the shawl from her head and pulled her braids from the front of her dress aggressively, displaying the silver-and-sapphire bead. Still, the sentries did not withdraw. Thorin raised his head from the safety of Meisar's embrace and faced them, red-eyed and grimacing, with a firm nod. "Leave us."
The two sentries looked at each other, then bowed quickly and drew back. Thorin sighed heavily into Meisar's embrace and his body, after rigidly holding itself away from curling into a fetal position, came to a greater ease against her own. After the storm there was a calm for which all the burdens of a life, a world, had been lessened, if only for an ephemeral window of time. Thorin raised himself tenuously at first on one elbow and hauled quickly to his feet, brushing the ice and cold grit from his clothing, as the two sentries dispersed, still looking back over their shoulders at them. When they had re-entered the tower, Thorin turned to Meisar and encircled her tightly in his arms. "I would not have come without you," he confessed in a hushed whisper into her scalp, tears coming through the roots of her hair to dampen her scalp.
"I love you with all my being, Thorin. There is nothing I would not stand beside you for." The mountain, in the afternoon, brightly illuminated in the sun however dim it was on the outer edge of winter, was visible with a clearing of the light fog. Leaning heavily into each other's embraces for many moments, they stared out at it together. Thorin pressed her back slowly and walked out to the edge looking northward. She followed close behind.
"What are you thinking right now?" She let her hand slip into his from behind.
"It is different than the last time I beheld it." There on the field where the battle had built to a frenzy, were many merchants and travelers all going about their business briskly in and out of Dale along river and road. He turned his head away from the sight.
"Are you afraid?" she asked gently.
"Yes."
"I will be by your side, for all that will come, this day and the rest." She rested her head on the back of his shoulder. He brought her arm forward to wrap around him and clasped her hand against his torso. She could feel something rumbling still and quavering deep within him, but for the time, his legs had stopped shaking. "I had to come, Meisar. Before I faced her, Thorin looked down over the meticulous fields east of the Lonely Mountain, fallow as they lay at the end of autumn. In the valley between the spurs of the Lonely Mountain's southern face the walls of Dale, though solemn gray, were new and solid. "It is not as I remember."
"Since Bard has been king, it has been prosperous here they say," Meisar acknowledged cautiously. Thorin made a low acquiescing murmur toward her. In the vale they could see wagons trawling up and down the road, caravans and pack animals and boats, forming neat lanes down the River Running. "Perhaps you are right," he sighed with a forced smile. "But I shan't let him insult you again without consequence." She purred a soft sound of satisfaction into the back of his shoulder.
Overhead a murder of ravens emerged from the rookery of the guard tower, flapping and cawing their way toward the mountain. Meisar put her arms quietly around Thorin's left. "They say it is a true portent of a king's return to the mountain," she said quietly.
"Portents have lesser real value than they are given," Thorin sighed low.
"Perhaps, but they were not here on the last journey east." He turned and placed his hands firmly at her waist and kissed her temple lightly. She ran her hand down the back of his head, dusting crumbs of gravel and gritty ice from his long hair. "Before we go home," she offered gently. "Let me brush it for you, and braid it." She rolled the makeshift bead on the right-side plait in her finger and plucked it loose. The braids were both fraying a bit. She bid him sit and rest combed his hair laboriously with his comb and her horsehair Elven brush, until it lay so silky and full over his shoulders. "You will feel better love when your hair is braided. Braided like a king's should be."
He could see all, looking down upon the busy valley between the spurs of the mountain where Dale lay. It lived. Like the days of old. Meisar threaded his hair quietly through nimble fingers, plaiting as carefully as ever she had. When she had finished, she clasped the bead to the tip and ran both hands over his chest below the clasps of his braids.
"Are you ready to go home, my king?"
"Yes," he said, mustering his breath again. "I am ready."
Bâha-zunsh-hund- Ravenhill